May Day is this week!  Nationwide shutdown, bring your community together and hit the ruling class where it hurts, the bottom line!

Getting to our regular headlines, we have stories from Starbucks, Harvard, REI, the University of California, Samsung, Bangladeshi gig workers, Portuguese nurses, and the workers of Brazil. For our main stories, first we discuss a strike by workers at Illinois State University, who are fighting just to afford to live where they work. A recently launched initiative, Union Now, aims to harness the energy workers have to support organizing, we discuss the possible implications.  Finally, we do a deep dive into the countrywide assault on speech on university campuses, and the ongoing war by the ruling class to silence any voice but their own.

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Follow the pod at instagram.com/workstoppage, @WorkStoppagePod on Twitter,  John @facebookvillain, and Lina @solidaritybee

Headlines on this 20th of April start with the breaking news of the change in Labor Secretary. Then we've got stories from Amazon, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Texas Tech University, Columbia University, Long Island Concrete, Florida's hospitality industry, and NASA. Over 30,000 building workers in NYC nearly went on strike, we discuss what the strike threat won in their new contracts. We discuss more of the ever increasing indicators that our economy just...doesn't work. Finally, educators and school staff in LA just won massive contract gains after nearly following their fellow workers in San Francisco on strike.

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This week's headlines include: Chicago nurses, Starbucks, Philz Coffee, Apple, the University of Alaska Anchorage, the University of Illinois Springfield, ProPublica, and the California Faculty Association. We start our main stories discussing the recent victorious strike at JBS in Colorado and break down what workers won. St John's University recently became the latest Catholic university in the US to try and dissolve its faculty union, but workers are fighting back. Finally, we discuss the impacts workers around the world are facing from the unprovoked US-Israeli war on Iran.

Suggested Reading: https://inthesetimes.com/article/permanent-war-state-iran-workers-struggle

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Follow the pod at instagram.com/workstoppage, @WorkStoppagePod on Twitter, John @facebookvillain, and Lina @solidaritybee

This week we are excited to bring listeners an interview that brings together two of our most urgent areas of discussion on our show: union democracy and the fight against ICE terror. We're honored to be joined by Leo and Kevin, two organizers with CREW, the Caucus of Rank and File Electrical Workers, an internal reform caucus in the IBEW. Not only are the folks in CREW working hard to make the IBEW a democratic, fighting union, as workers in the construction industry they are on the front lines of ICE's war against the working class. We discuss their goals of internal union reform, strategies for talking to coworkers who might have absorbed right wing talking points, and how the fight against ICE terror and the fight for our rights at work can't be separated.

Contact CREW: https://www.rankandfilecrew.org/

Email: [email protected]

Maine Solidarity Fund: https://www.mainesolidarity.org/

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Follow the pod at instagram.com/workstoppage, @WorkStoppagePod on Twitter, John @facebookvillain, and Lina @solidaritybee

We've got a long one this week with so much going on. We start with an extra long headlines section checking in with Portland Community College, the University of Washington, the University of Illinois, Microsoft, the Daily Wire, Waffle House, Webasto, DHL, Grubhub, and the NFL. Following an update on the status of the strike at JBS in Colorado, we discuss a recent strike at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the refusal of even publicly funded broadcasters to pay their workers. Resident doctors in the UK have been forced to strike yet again, for the fifteenth time, in their struggle to restore their pay just to where it was 18 years ago. Finally, the union struggle at Amazon has been going on for half a decade and this week workers gained two important victories in advancing the fight.

Join the discord: discord.gg/tDvmNzX 

Follow the pod at instagram.com/workstoppage, @WorkStoppagePod on Twitter,  John @facebookvillain, and Lina @solidaritybee

This week we are excited to bring listeners an interview that brings together two of our most urgent areas of discussion on our show: union democracy and the fight against ICE terror. We're honored to be joined by Leo and Kevin, two organizers with CREW, the Caucus of Rank and File Electrical Workers, an internal reform caucus in the IBEW. Not only are the folks in CREW working hard to make the IBEW a democratic, fighting union, as workers in the construction industry they are on the front lines of ICE's war against the working class. We discuss their goals of internal union reform, strategies for talking to coworkers who might have absorbed right wing talking points, and how the fight against ICE terror and the fight for our rights at work can't be separated.

Contact CREW: https://www.rankandfilecrew.org/

Maine Solidarity Fund: https://www.mainesolidarity.org/

Join the discord: discord.gg/tDvmNzX 

Follow the pod at instagram.com/workstoppage, @WorkStoppagePod on Twitter,  John @facebookvillain, and Lina @solidaritybee

We start out with a reportback from Dan and Lina who went to their local No Kings protests and discuss the energy behind the call for a May Day general strike. We've got headlines this week from Canada Post, AirTrain, United Airlines, TSA, Western Washington University, Starbucks, Amazon, and Patagonia. The major strike by meatpackers at JBS in Colorado has been extended as workers continue to fight for a fair deal. Non-tenure track faculty have been deeply exploited by US universities in recent years, but this week those educators won a historic contract at NYU that could set a new standard. Finally, we discuss a recent piece in the Guardian on the wave of attacks on child labor laws across the country, and how ill it bodes for our whole economy.

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Follow the pod at instagram.com/workstoppage, @WorkStoppagePod on Twitter,  John @facebookvillain, and Lina @solidaritybee

Late last year, teachers at the Highlander Charter School in Providence, Rhode Island launched the state's first ever strike at a charter school. We have covered a lot of teachers strikes on our show, but strikes at charters have been few and far between. Just as with teachers at traditional public schools, teachers at charters are on the front lines of the struggle not only for their own working conditions, but for their students' learning conditions. So we were super excited to speak with the teachers at Highlander about their struggle, the lessons they've learned, and how teacher organizing can help build stronger communities!

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Follow the pod at instagram.com/workstoppage, @WorkStoppagePod on Twitter,  John @facebookvillain, and Lina @solidaritybee

We start this week's episode with headlines from CBS, ProPublica, Portland Community College, REI, Starbucks, Corewell Health, the WNBA, Atlassian Software, and the Tornel Rubber Company. Our first story checks in on the strike by Colorado meatpackers at JBS in a fight for safety and dignity on the job. Workers at Kaiser Permanente both ended a major strike with a win AND started a new strike in the same week. Horrific revelations of abuse by UFW co-founder Cesar Chavez rocked the labor world this week, we discuss the impact and lessons for the future of the movement. Finally, a recent interview in Jacobin discussed the way workers in Australia are fighting a similar issue we have here in the US, the disconnect between struggle on the shop floor and political action for the working class.

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Follow the pod at instagram.com/workstoppage, @WorkStoppagePod on Twitter,  John @facebookvillain, and Lina @solidaritybee

Somehow it's been 300 whole episodes since we started this show. But as long as work continues stopping, we will keep discussing it! We've got headlines from the MST, Belgian trade unions, Portland Community College, REI, Starbucks, Amazon, American Axle, and AFGE. JBS workers in Colorado are on strike, the biggest in meatpacking in decades. Oakland workers in logistics are trying to navigate how best they can do their part in gumming up the war machine when the boxes they move aren't even labeled. Student Workers of Columbia are poised once again to strike as their bosses in admin keep trying to drive student unions from existence. Finally, we discuss the Mamdani Administration in NYC and several stories about how policies are affecting workers in these first couple months.

Join the discord: discord.gg/tDvmNzX 

Follow the pod at instagram.com/workstoppage, @WorkStoppagePod on Twitter,  John @facebookvillain, and Lina @solidaritybee