WFHB

Our opening song is “Lucky Day.” This is Judy Garland’s version from the London sessions of 1960. The first performance of the song was by Harry Richman in a 1926 Broadway revue.

“Lucky Day” became a theme song for the 1940s NBC radio show Your Hit Parade which was sponsored by Lucky Strike cigarettes. Sponsoring radio and television shows and getting celebrities to promote smoking was essential to the goal of addicting massive numbers of people to this deleterious habit (often called a “choice”). Al Jolson, fresh off his star turn in black face in the 1927 film The Jazz Singer, was happy to say of Lucky Strikes that

Toasting kills off all the irritants, so my voice is as clear as a bell in every scene. Folks, let me tell you, the good old flavor of Luckies is as sweet and soothing as the best “Mammy” song ever written… There’s one great thing about the toasted flavor…it surely satisfies the craving for sweets. That’s how I always keep in good shape and always feel peppy.

Advertising has played an immense role in helping millions enjoy the toasted delight of a cancerous death.

When the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) began to investigate the so-called health claims of American Tobacco it appears to have done so at the behest of U.S. candy corporations!

Today’s show focuses more on the way the cigarette industry shaped the form and legal structure which all corporations would follow in the US. One of those key forms was Jim Crow segregation, effectively keeping those who knew the most about Bright Leaf tobacco, black farmers in North Carolina, far away from the rewards of that expertise and instead employing the tobacco experts in the worst jobs in the manufacturing process.

GUEST

Nan Enstad is the Robinson Edwards Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and the current Director of the UW Food Studies Network. Enstad is the author of Cigarettes, Inc.: An Intimate History of Corporate Imperialism, published by the University of Chicago Press, and Ladies of Labor, Girls of Adventure: Popular Culture and Labor Politics at the turn of the Twentieth Century, which appeared from Columbia University Press in 1999.

I interviewed Nan Enstad in Madison, Wisconsin at the studios of community radio station WORT. Many thanks for their hospitality.

RELATED

Debunking the Capitalist Cowboy by Nan Enstad (Boston Review)

How Jim Crow Went to China in the Making of Big Tobacco (Interview with Nan Enstad n Truthout)

Al Jolson & Luckies by Jack Doyle

MUSIC

"Lucky Day" performed by Judy Garland

"Nicotine Stain" by Siouxsie and the Banshees

"Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)" by Tex Williams

"Last Cigarette" by Dramarama

"Cigarette" by The Smithereens

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

In the U.S., death and injury on the job are considered to be a condition of doing business, a necessary evil that is often said to come about because of “operator error” — everyone makes mistakes after all, why should an employer or corporation bear the burden of what is surely just a fact of …

In the U.S., death and injury on the job are considered to be a condition of doing business, a necessary evil that is often said to come about because of “operator error” -- everyone makes mistakes after all, why should an employer or corporation bear the burden of what is surely just a fact of human nature? To make this assumption is to assert that the worker has been properly trained for the specific job being done; that the worker has been given the proper clothing and protective gear; that the workplace itself has been made as safe as possible and all machinery is in safe working order. It’s to assume “the best” of the employer and at the same time “the worst” of the employee and to accept that to work at a place like Tyson Foods is to know and expect you might be the one employee a month to lose a body part. Hey, you chose to work there, that’s on you.

But that reality is status quo on the job in an America where 13 of us die on the job every day...and that’s a number based on on employer data, which is less than complete or reliable.

That narrative needs to be challenged and changed.

Workers have a right to a safe workplace. The law requires employers to provide their employees with safe and healthful workplaces.

Today we explore the antagonism of business organizations against The Occupational Safety and Health Administration, or OSHA, the agency established under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which President Richard Nixon signed into law on December 29, 1970. Perhaps it’s no surprise that the “regulated community” has constantly been working to undermine and underfund the work that OSHA does. It seems businesses prefer the days of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire of 1911 where 146 workers died, mostly women and girls, because the factory owners locked exit doors during work hours to restrict employee breaks. If you’re on a break, or using the bathroom, you’re taking money out the master’s, er, the employer’s pocket.

It seems, just as in 1911, we should all be asking still, is going to work a grave mistake?

We begin with guest Jon Karmel’s assertion that “accident” is the wrong word to use for workplace injury and death as it shifts responsibility onto the worker’s back.

GUEST

Jonathan Karmel has practiced labor and employment law in Chicago for 35 years representing unions and their employee benefit funds. A Fellow with The College of Labor and Employment Lawyers, he’s recently become the co-Chair of the American Bar Association’s Occupational Safety and Health Committee. He is the author of Dying to Work: Death and Injury in the American Workplace, published by Cornell University Press.

RELATED

This job is killing me: Not a metaphor

America's Largest Meat Producer Averages One Amputation Per Month

Amputations abound at Tyson Foods, OSHA records shed more light on industrial food production

Amazon faces $28,000 fine over death at Indiana warehouse

The Demolition of Workers’ Comp by Michael Grabell and Howard Berkes

Occupational Safety and Health Administration

MUSIC

"Factory Girl" Rhiannon Giddens

In his essential essay, “Fate,” published in 1860 in the book The Conduct of Life, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes: The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages, –leaf after leaf,–never returning one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of …

In his essential essay, "Fate," published in 1860 in the book The Conduct of Life, Ralph Waldo Emerson writes:

The book of Nature is the book of Fate. She turns the gigantic pages, --leaf after leaf,--never returning one. One leaf she lays down, a floor of granite; then a thousand ages, and a bed of slate; a thousand ages, and a measure of coal; a thousand ages, and a layer of marl and mud: vegetable forms appear; her first misshapen animals, zoophyte, trilobium, fish; then, saurians,--rude forms, in which she has only blocked her future statue, concealing under these unwieldly monsters the fine type of her coming king. The face of the planet cools and dries, the races meliorate, and man is born. But when a race has lived its term, it comes no more again. The population of the world is a conditional population…

Of course, Emerson’s "coming king" has seemingly found a way to turn one of Nature’s gigantic pages and reveal just how conditional the human population is.

Dahr Jamail shows us this as well in his new book The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption, published by The New Press, in which, chapter by chapter, he takes us on a tour of our endings: the end of ice, the end of forests, the end of the coral reef, the end of coastal cities. It is in this way, as he stands within the sites of destruction, that he bears witness for us.

So, too, Jamail asks us to begin to grieve for the world that is surely lost and to find a way toward adaptive change so that something may be salvaged. It may seem strange to say so, but, to quote Emerson again, this time from the essay "Circles," The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.

"A man" said Oliver Cromwell "never rises so high as when he knows not whither he is going." This is our plight; may we rise to meet it.

GUEST

Dahr Jamail, is an award-winning journalist whose previous books are The Will to Resist: Soldiers Who Refuse to Fight in Iraq and Afghanistan (Haymarket Books, 2009), and Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches From an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq (Haymarket Books, 2007). Jamail reported from Iraq for more than a year, as well as from Lebanon, Syria, Jordan and Turkey over the last ten years.

RELATED

When the ice melts: the catastrophe of vanishing glaciers by Dahr Jamail

Dahr Jamail at Truthout

The Coldest Spot on Earth, Melting (Counterpunch)

MUSIC

"You Don’t Pull No Punches, But You Don’t Push the River," Van Morrison

"What Difference Does It Make," Bobby Bare, Jr.

"Too Early," Son Volt

"Groovy Tuesday," The Smithereens

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

On March 30 this year, WFHB partnered with several local businesses, the Ryder Magazine and Film series, the Burroughs Century, the Debs Foundation, and Indiana University, to bring Paul Buhle to Bloomington to talk about his new graphic biography of Eugene V. Debs (drawn by Noah Van Sciver and published by Verso) and the necessity …

On March 30 this year, WFHB partnered with several local businesses, the Ryder Magazine and Film series, the Burroughs Century, the Debs Foundation, and Indiana University, to bring Paul Buhle to Bloomington to talk about his new graphic biography of Eugene V. Debs (drawn by Noah Van Sciver and published by Verso) and the necessity of utopian thinking.

What better way than this kind of community collaboration to demonstrate to you the value proposition of WFHB--not only do we support the community’s learning, we share that with the greater listening public--an audience that can be found across the globe. WFHB is volunteer powered and listener funded. Which means we exist at your pleasure. Take the time to support us with your attention and your money. The easiest way to do this is to click here: Donate!

Dynamic and beloved American radical, labor leader, and socialist Eugene Victor Debs led the Socialist Party to federal and state office across the United States by the 1920s. Imprisoned for speaking out against World War I, Debs ran for president from prison on the Socialist Party ticket, receiving over 1 million votes. Debs’s life is a story of labor battles in industrializing America, of a fighting socialist politics grown directly out of the Midwest heartland, and of a distinctly American vision of socialism.

Today Interchange brings you selections from our March 30th event so you can partake in a chapter of the nation’s history that is at once specific to Indiana, Terre Haute to be precise, but so much larger than the Hoosier State.

As much as this was a Debs event, it was also a Paul Buhle event.

Cartoon Paul Buhle by Steve Chappell

Paul Buhle is one of the foremost historians of American radicalism and the American Left having authored or edited over 30 books, including works such as Images of American Radicalism, Marxism in the United States, the Encyclopedia of the American Left, and Radical Hollywood. He is also the editor of over a dozen comic art books that are wide-ranging yet consistent in Socialist and Radical perspective: There are books on Jesus, The Beats, Bohemians, The Wobblies, Rosa Luxemburg, Che Guevara, the Irish martyr James Connolly, Johnny Appleseed, Gene Debs, and most recently Herbert Marcuse. Buhle founded the SDS Journal Radical America and the archive Oral History of the American Left.

Our program features an in-studio interview with Buhle; we’ll hear Debs’ words brought to life by four local writers; and ends with Buhle talking to an audience about the socialist utopianism of Debs finding form in the counterculture of the 1960s and breathing life into a new generation willing to march against capitalism and climate disruption.

SEGMENT ONE

Alex Lichtenstein, editor of the American Historical Review and professor in the History Department at Indiana University interviews Paul Buhle in the WFHB studios about the role of comics in conveying complex historical events and lives to young readers.

SEGMENT TWO

Michael Glab reads "What's the Matter with Chicago?"

Joan Hawkins reads "The Rights of Working Women"

SEGMENT THREE

Tony Brewer reads selections from "An Ideal Labor Press"

Eric Rensberger reads the "Statement to the Court Upon Being Convicted of Violating the Sedition Act"

SEGMENT FOUR

Paul Buhle on the necessity of utopian ideals to bring us a working socialism.

Our THANKS to: Paul Buhle, Alex Lichtenstein, Joan Hawkins, Tony Brewer, Eric Rensberger, Michael Glab, Charles Cannon, Peter LoPilato, Bella Bravo, Hugh Farrell, Wes Martin, The Ryder Magazine and Film Series, The Grant Street Inn, Bloomingfoods,

Taking a close, insider’s, look at Chicago’s industrial Southeast Side in the 1970’s and early 1980’s offers us lessons of a period brought forward to our current moment, when talking heads and politicians spout off about middle class values and middle class jobs and the way to make America great…again. What today’s show makes clear …

Taking a close, insider’s, look at Chicago’s industrial Southeast Side in the 1970’s and early 1980’s offers us lessons of a period brought forward to our current moment, when talking heads and politicians spout off about middle class values and middle class jobs and the way to make America great...again. What today’s show makes clear is that there’s no “middle” in America, just a great mass of exploited labor fed the dream of ease if only they’d just work a bit harder, and a bit longer.

My guest is Dave Ranney, who from 1976 to 1982, worked at several factory jobs in Southeast Chicago and Northwest Indiana, after leaving the far less dangerous work of being an urban planning professor in Iowa. Ranney’s day-to-day life on the factory floor is punctuated by spontaneous wildcat strikes over management abuses, an immigration raid, industrial accidents, a failed effort to unionize and a murder. He details this in his new book, Living and Dying on the Factory Floor: From the Outside In and the Inside Out, newly published by PM Press.

By sharing his life working in the “lower end” of the so-called Middle Class Dave Ranney wants readers to question what it is we want to bring back in order to make these working lives great? Ranney notes he got paid better for these difficult and dangerous jobs than workers do today, making the 2018 equivalent of about $23.00 an hour in the period he was a welder at Solo Cup. The average hourly wage for a welder today, nearly 40 years later, is $19.00. Wages are down and the cost of living is way up...what institutions in the US have the workers’ backs?

These “middle class jobs” pitted black and brown labor against white labor, white management, and white owners, in factories that served as sites of immigration policy for social control, endangered worker safety and health, practiced environmental pollution as a matter of course, and hindered our ability to create a just society.

And what about labor unions? In Living and Dying on the Factory Floor, they’re either “mobbed up” or legally required, and satisfied, to side with the bosses...just another way to keeping the working stiffs at the grind.

We’ll open with “At McKie’s” by Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins off of the 1963 album Sonny Meets Hawk! McKie’s was a famous jazz club at 63rd and Cottage in Woodlawn in Chicago. We’re headed a bit further south and a little east from McKie’s for today’s Interchange.

GUEST

David Ranney is Professor Emeritus in the College of Urban Planning and Public Affairs at the University of Illinois Chicago. He’s also the author of Global Decisions, Local Collisions: Urban Life in the New World Order and New World Disorder: The Decline of U.S. Power.

RELATED

Teaching a Man to Fish in a Steel Mill in Gary, Indiana (On Noel Ignatiev's Acceptable Men)

There ain’t no justice, just us (Book Excerpt, Living and Dying on the Factory Floor)

“We’re Gonna Shut This Place Down,” an Interview with David Ranney (Jacobin)

Black Worker White Worker, Noel Ignatiev (Sojourner Truth Organization, 1972)

MUSIC

“At McKie’s” Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins

“Gates of Steel” Devo

“Red Solo Cup” Toby Keith

“The Chemical Worker’s Song” Great Big Sea

“Pollution” Bo Diddley

CREDITS

Producer & Host: Doug Storm

Executive Producer: Wes Martin

Main Photo:

Tim Brennan joined me in the WFHB studio when he was in Bloomington to deliver the lecture “Biopolitics: The Limits of the Liberal Imagination” as a guest of the Contemporary Africa Seminar Speaker Series. The conversation ranged from the aforementioned biopolitics to seeing the state as a precious and necessary form of human freedom even …