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Labor Radio KBOO 90.7 FM

Catch Labor Radio every Monday night from 6 to 6:30 pm PT. Tune in on Portland’s community radio station, KBOO 90.7 FM, stream live anywhere in the world at http://www.kboo.fm/listen, or subscribe to the  Labor Radio podcast

08/13/2012 – Students Strike Back Against Austerity — In Portland and Quebec
With total student debt now surpassing even total credit card debt, students and graduates around the world are looking austerity in the face and mobilizing against it. On tonight’s show we speak with independent writer and researcher Andrew Gavin Marshall of Montreal, Canada about how the student strike in Quebec ignited a popular uprising in the Maple Spring and where the movement is going next. Read more of his work at andrewgavinmarshall.com. Then we speak with Emily Lehr, Portland State University student and activist, about what debt means for Oregonians today and how students here are organizing to fight back against austerity. Get in touch through their Facebook group, Portland Student Debt Coalition.

06/11/2012 – Stories from Labor Notes Conference 2012
Tonight’s Labor Radio features some wonderful highlights from the closing plenary at the May 2012 Labor Notes Conference in Chicago, bringing together people committed to rank-and-file leadership and militancy in the labor movement. Speakers include Ken Spatta, a CWA Local 1101 member, Verizon striker and recently-elected leader in the reform slate Rebuild 1101; Maricruz Manzanares, a University of California custodian, AFSCME Local 3299 member and recently-elected leader in the reform slate Members First; Robert Gagnon, a locked-out Rio Tinto steelworker from Quebec and a leader in Steelworkers Local 9490; and Michelle Crentsil, an activist in Occupy Wall Street’s People of Color Caucus and union organizer.

05/14/2012 – Bus Riders Unite
Khahn Pham and Jared Franz from OPAL / Bus Riders Unite speak about the transit systems proposed cuts, OPALs alternatives that put riders first and unity with transit workers.

04/09/2012 – Insecure Communities, May Day, !Ya Basta!
Suppose you had to quiz your children: “What’s your plan if I don’t come home today?” On tonight’s show we talk with CAUSA organizer Aeryca Steinbauer about the local impact of ICE policy and how deportations are hurting families in Portland. Learn more and find out what you can do at Insecure Communities: A Community Forum on Ending Unjust Deportations, a free event at 7 pm this Friday, April 13th, at the First Unitarian Church downtown at 1011 SW 13th. CAUSA is part of a network called ACT for Justice and Dignity. In the second half of the show we talk with Kari Koch of Portland Liberation Organizing Council about organizing for this year’s May Day, including a planned building liberation. The show also features the song !Ya Basta! by Evan Greer, who is doing three shows in town this weekend with Bonfire Madigan on the Tiny Fists Tour.

03/12/2012 – The Mother of All Strikes: Botswana 2011
You probably didn’t read about it in the paper, but last spring, more than 90,000 public employees in Botswana walked out on a record-breaking two month strike. Pnina Werbner, professor emerita of social anthropology at Keele University in the UK, was there, and she joined us in the studio to talk about it. She is working on a book on the Manual Workers Union and other public sector unions in Botswana, and she visited Portland to give a talk at Reed College entitled “The Mother of All Strikes: Popular Protest Culture and Vernacular Cosmopolitanism in the Botswana Public Service Unions’ Strike, 2011.” She came into the KBOO studio to talk with host Al Bradbury about how the workers employed playful songs and other creative tactics to sustain their unity over the period, how they related their struggle to the anti-authoritarian and anti-austerity popular uprisings in many countries that year, and the political and social impacts of the strike.

02/20/2012 – Oregon educators fight to improve our schools, and Portland Occupy activists take on corporate giants
First we speak with Hanaa Vaandering, a physical education teacher and vice president of the Oregon Education Association, about today’s action in Salem and the fight to improve our schools. Then we speak with Dustin Hawks, an activist iwth the Longview Planning Group of Occupy, about port mobilizations and taking on corporations. Plus we hear a couple of great tunes from the Seattle duo Rebel Voices.

01/09/2012 – Union-busting at the Fund for Public Interest, and the inner workings of the Red & Black Cafe collective
Kris Humbird and his coworkers at the Fund for the Public Interest call center — which raises funds for OSPIRG and Environment Oregon — formed a union with CWA Local 7901 this past October. Kris joined us in studio to talk about the job he loves, the trouble with fundraising quotas, and the ugly union-busting side of these beloved progressive organizations. If Kris and his coworkers are taking one step towards a voice in their workplace, John Langley and his coworkers at the Red and Black Cafe have taken it a step farther: They own and run the restaurant themselves, as a worker-owned cooperative. John joined us by phone to talk about life without a boss.

12/12/2011 – Longshore Workers in the Fight, from Longview, Washington to Buenaventura, Colombia
Tonight’s show features the current struggles of workers in two ports. First we speak with Dan Coffman, President of ILWU Local 21, about the Longview workers’ courageous fight against the transnational corporation EGT, and how their community has mobilized and braved police brutality to stand up for good local jobs. Then we hear John Walsh’s interview with longshore workers of Unión Portuaria in Buenaventura, Colombia, talking about the conditions in which they live and work, and their own workplace struggles.

11/14/2011 – Capitalism and Its Discontents; and Cops for Labor?
We talk with author Sasha Lilley about her book Capital and Its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult, Occupy Oakland, and her activism as a shop steward at KPFA radio station in Oakland, California, where she co-produces and co-hosts the program Against the Grain. Then we talk with Kristian Williams about police, their unions, and their relationship to the working class. He is the author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America and the recent article “Cops for Labor?” in the September/October issue of Dollars and Sense magazine, and a member of the National Writers Union. You can find more of his writings at http://www.kristianwilliams.com.

10/10/2011 – Labor Radio’s IWW Special!
Al Bradbury and Angela MacWhinnie bring you a Very Special Episode of Labor Radio, all about the IWW. Wobbly guests include Daniel Gross, IWW organizer, co-founder of the Starbucks Workers’ Union, and author of the preface to the new edition of Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology; Brendan Phillips, Portland community organizer and frontperson of the band Fast Rattler, on the band’s new album “Linger On,” a tribute to Brendan’s father, the legendary Wobbly storyteller and folksinger Utah Phillips; Bill Adler, author of the celebrated new biography of Joe Hill, The Man Who Never Died; and Emmitt Nolan, Portland IWW member, on organizing in the food and retail industry, and the upcoming IWW Food & Retail Workers Union Founding Convention.

09/12/2011 – Rank & File Organizing and Labor Militancy
“You should be scared, son. You know, I’m scared too. But the fear’s not the problem. It’s what you do with it.” We speak with filmmaker Joan Sekler about Locked Out, her film about the 500 courageous miners in Boron, California, who faced down the huge mining corporation Rio Tinto. “To me, the most enduring unity among workers — particularly if they’re in different unions — is built from the bottom up, on a cross-union basis.” Then we speak with Steve Early, labor activist and author of The Civil Wars in U.S. Labor: Birth of New Workers’ Movement or Death Throes of the Old? about the challenges of new organizing, the birth of new movements in unions, and resurgence of labor militancy.

08/08/2011 – IKEA Furniture Factory Workers Unionize! and The Deficit Myth
We start with the workers who made your IKEA bookshelf at a factory in Danville, Virginia. Last month they formed a union with a sweeping 76% majority, after collecting twice as many signatures of support as there are people in the town of Danville! How’d they do it? We speak with organizer Bill Street of the Woodworkers’ department of the Machinists’ union. Then, headlines over the last month have been dominated by theatrics in DC over the national budget. The debate supposedly centered around a massive national deficit, but nothing is quite as it seems. For more insight into this massively irritating manufactured crisis, and where we go from here, we spoke with Laurie King of Portland Jobs with Justice’s Economic Crisis Committee.

07/11/2011 – Tri-Met Riders Unite! and Inquisitive Frog Visits Rep. Blumenauer
“I absolutely love bus organizing. Bus riders are my people.” As Tri-Met raises fares and decreases service, a bus ticket costs more than ever and may not get you as far. A growing network of working-class transit riders are reaching out to each other on the bus and organizing to demand transfers that last three hours instead of two. We speak with community organizer Crystal Wabnum of OPAL (Organizing People, Activating Leaders) about the Campaign for a Fair Transfer. Song: “Well May the World Go,” Pete Seeger. “Free trade! It sounds good: free.” Puppet Franklin the Frog and puppeteer Paige Shell-Spurling paid a recent visit to Representative Earl Blumenauer’s office, where they witnessed a teach-in on three free trade agreements coming up for imminent votes. We interview the two of them about the issues, other creative actions this week, and the role of art in the movement. See the video of their visit! And find more info on the issues at Oregon Fair Trade Campaign and Portland Central America Solidarity Committee.

6/13/11 – New hope for Single Payer! and West Coast unity for San Francisco hotel workers
RN and longtime health care and labor activist Betsy Zucker brings us some major good news in the campaign for single payer, including a groundbreaking victory in Vermont and a change of direction from labor’s top organizational leadership. Then, bellhop Marc Norton, who worked for almost twelve years as a bellhop at the Hotel Frank in San Francisco tells how the new hotel owners have tried to break the longtime union, and how workers there are fighting back (check out their web site hotelfranksf.info and on Facebook Boycott Hotel Frank). Portland IWW member Noah is helping organize a solidarity rally at Portland’s Hotel Lucia.

5/3/11 – Special short segment: UC grad students occupy union hall, train web-cams on uncounted ballots
On Monday, May 2nd, a group of University of California graduate students began a sit-in at their own union hall, UAW Local 2865. The students are demanding the completion of an interrupted vote count in a closely contested race between two slates for union leadership. Since Saturday night when the vote count was halted, the insurgent caucus has been using web cams to monitor the boxes of still uncounted ballots. Late Monday night, KBOO spoke with Jessica Taal, a candidate for Head Steward at UC Davis and a member of the Academic Workers for a Democratic Union caucus, which is challenging the incumbent United for Social and Economic Justice caucus.

4/11/11 – Portland Rising: Fifteen thousand workers in collective bargaining this summer
Negotiating a collective bargaining agreement is tough. Negotiating during hard economic times is even tougher. Despite the down economy, workers across the state — including 15,000 Portland workers in bargaining right now — are staying on the offense to fight for jobs, fairness and the respect we all deserve. We speak with Toby Green of Laborers Local 483, Al Shropshire, a welder and member of the United Association of Plumbers, Steamfitters, and Apprentices, and Jerry Kohler, a Mt. Hood Community College faculty member and member of Oregon Education Association about their contract struggles, pickets and strikes, and why they are uniting in the Portland Rising campaign this summer.

3/14/11 – Best of Times, Worst of Times: Waking Up the Slumbering Giant in Wisconsin
Will 2011 be remembered the beginning of a great uprising, or as labor’s last gasp? Governors in Wisconsin and across the country are pushing draconian measures to cut public services and the power of working people, but union workers and their allies are mobilizing resistance on a scale not seen for decades in this country. We speak with Adam Sanchez, member of Portland Association of Teachers and ILWU Local 5, who recently traveled to Madison to join protesters occupying the Capitol, and with Gina Bianchi, a first grade teacher and member of Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, who was in the Capitol Thursday when the anti-union bill passed the Assembly.

2/14/11 – Organizing Strategy Special: The 2011 Egyptian Revolution
Eyptian Portlander Ahmad Raslan lays out the crescendo of events that brought eight million people into the streets and toppled the Mubarak regime last week: “The working-class people in many many cities, for the last three days, they started going on strikes. There was a threat of civil disobedience across the entire Egypt. And I think that’s what made the military at the end tell the president ‘We can’t afford this. If working-class people start getting into this from a strike perspective and from a civil disobedience perspective, then we have to end it.’ And they ended it.” Then, Stanford Professor of Middle East History Joel Beinin, author of Justice For All: The Struggle for Worker Rights in Egypt, traces the remarkable wave strikes and sit-ins in which two million Egyptian workers have taken part over the last ten years: “So people learned that you can struggle and you can win and it might be worthwhile. And once that barrier of fear is broken, then anything is possible, in an authoritarian regime, because it’s the fear that the regime depends on for maintaining its power.” Plus, new songs for the revolution from Ramy Essam and Mohamed Mounir.

1/16/11 – Housing special: How to organize to make your landlord shape up; plus tips for folks facing foreclosure
Tonight’s show is close to home: we’re talking about your house or apartment. Whether you’re paying your landlord or paying the bank, the roof over your head is probably one of your biggest monthly expenses, and the more the financial classes play games with real estate, the more difficult it becomes for working-class people to get and keep safe, affordable housing. But in organizing there is hope! Tenants in Portland are successfully standing together to make their landlords deal with mold and other unsafe housing conditions. We talk with Cristina Palacios, Coordinator of the Safe Housing Project at Community Alliance of Tenants, about how they’re doing it. And for folks facing foreclosure, we get some practical tips from Omar Martinez, Homeownership Program Manager at Hacienda CDC.

12/13/10 – Reclaiming Factories from Massachusetts to Argentina
Factories across the United States have been closing up shops for decades. Less common, however, is worker initiated factory takeovers. Today’s show will span from Argentina where workers occupied factories and established cooperative control all the way to Massachusetts where a union is fighting the closure of a plant and wants to reopen as an employee-run operation. Our guests are Peter Knowlton, President of the UE’s Northeast Region who has been the union rep at Haskon Factory in Tauton, Massachusetts for 22 years, and Sean Abbott-Klafter, soon-to-be teacher who studied the factory takeover movement in Argentina and lived there for six months.

11/8/10 – A textbook case of union-busting: Portland French School teachers struggle for recognition
“I never could imagine that one day when I came to America — to pursue the American dream, like everybody –that I would come to a point when the management of my work would come and have that meeting. I will never forget that one. It comes in my nightmares at night. It went for five hours. It was like threats, clear threats from management: ‘The school is going to close.'” Our guest, Massene Mboup, is second-grade teacher and soccer coach at the Portland French School, and an activist in the teachers’ union organizing drive at the school. Thanks to management’s intimidation tactics — including threats of deportation and firing two employees — workers are still struggling to win recognition for their union, despite filing for election with more than seventy percent support last spring. Their story is a textbook example of the challenges workers face in organizing a union. We also replay a segment on a Los Angeles teacher who went on hunger strike to oppose cuts to California’s education funding.

10/11/10 – Membership drive special: Education reform and the war on teachers
Who is to blame for the failures of public education? The finger is often pointed at teachers and their unions. Tonight’s Labor Radio gives educators a chance to talk back. In tonight’s membership drive special we take a look at how so-called reforms add to the problems and what educators are doing to resist cutbacks and fight for the real transformations our schools need. First we speak with Bob Peterson, a fifth grade teacher and an editor for Rethinking Schools. Bob Peterson authored an article about the recent victory of the Caucus of Rank and File Educators (CORE) in Chicago, and we ask him about why that victory is important for educators around the country. Then we speak with Amanda Armstrong, a graduate student at UC Berkeley and a member of UAW Local 2865 about last Thursday’s day of action and a possible upcoming graduate students strike in the University of California system.

8/9/10 – Free Trade & the Fight for Fairness // Young Worker Organizing
On the campaign trail in 2008 Barack Obama called the Korea Free Trade Agreement “bad for America workers”, but now he’s announced that he’s moving forward on the deal. What’s with the change of heart? And how could the deal affect working people in Oregon? We speak with Arthur Stamoulis, Director of the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign. Then, we turn out attention to young workers who have been hit particularly hard by the economy. Be it high levels of unemployment or lack of insurance, young workers seem have inherited an economic mess. But, does this mean that young workers are clamoring to join the labor movement. We speak with Lydia Hallay, founder and organizer of the Next Wave, a committee of Oregon AFSCME that engages members 35 and younger.

7/21/10 – Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States
“We are in the middle of a whirlwind of struggle and opportunities for fundamental change abound; it’s just a question of how we use them.” …Or so say the members of Team Colors, a self-described “militant research” collective, who have just released a provocative new book called Uses of a Whirlwind: Movement, Movements, and Contemporary Radical Currents in the United States. Team Colors says it aims “to provide ‘strategic analysis for intervention into everyday life’.” The dozens of essays collected in the book offer glimpses into some of the most exciting contemporary social movements in the U.S. and a lot of sharp analysis about the challenges and strategies in what Team Colors calls “the ongoing war against state and capital.” We hear from some of the book’s editors and contributors, including reflections on the work of Family Farm Defenders, Domestic Workers United, Student/Farmworker Alliance, and more.

6/21/10 – Domestic workers win a Bill of Rights…and…Oregon students join with university staff to fight privatization
This month brought exciting news for New York State’s 200,000 domestic workers: After years of struggle, they have passed a Domestic Workers’ Bill of Rights through both houses of the state legislature. For the first time ever in the United States, domestic workers will have the right to sick days, holidays, vacation, overtime, and notice of termination. We spoke with Priscilla Gonzales, Director of Domestic Workers United and herself the proud daughter of a nanny and housekeeper, about the victory and about how domestic workers, abandoned by labor law, often working alone in private homes, have reached out to one another to organize. Next, we turn our attention to the funding crisis in higher education. Oregon university system administrators are proposing to save money by restructuring, but students, faculty and staff are concerned that could mean students pay more while faculty and staff get paid less. We spoke with Portland State University student Sami Alloy about the state of the funding crisis and how free speech is curtailed on campus in the name of risk management.

4/12/10 – Si Kahn on Creative Community Organizing
We spend the half-hour with renowned singer, songwriter and community organizer Si Kahn. His new book, Creative Community Organizing: A Guide for Rabble-Rousers, Activists, and Quiet Lovers of Justice, is full of amazing stories from his forty-five years in the struggle, working in the freedom movement with the SNCC, in the Brookside Strike in Harlan County with the United Mine Workers of America, in the textile mills of the South with the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union, and with Grassroots Leadership, the organization he founded, to abolish for-profit prisons and immigrant family detention. We play a couple of tracks off his new album, Courage, get Si to tell us a few stories, and ask him to share some of the insights into tactics and principles that he’s gleaned in nearly fifty years of organizing.

2/8/10 – The Big Picture: Labor’s Strategies on Global Climate Change and the Racial Wealth Divide
Labor Radio often brings you stories on real specific, immediate struggles, but tonight’s show is about the big picture. We talk with two longtime scholar-activists about labor’s strategies to address two of the larger-scope problems we face. We speak with Oregon AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Barbara Byrd, recently returned from the U.N. Summit on Climate Change in Copenhagen, and with Brian Miller, Executive Director of United for a Fair Economy and one of the authors of the seventh annual State of the Dream Report. This year’s report, subtitled “Drained,” contains data and analysis that shows how un-targeted economic stimulus spending mostly reaches white people, while African Americans and Latinos continue to disproportionately experience economic hardships.

1/10/10 – Class: What Do the Rich Owe the Rest of Us?
What’s the class consciousness of middle management? Who really has the power to subvert our unfair economy? We talk with local union member activist and campaign superstar David Delk, member of AFSCME Local 3135, about what Oregon ballot Measures 66 and 67 mean for working people and why he’s volunteering his time to make sure they pass. We also talk with author and professor Lisa Dodson who interviewed hundreds of middle-income middle managers and professionals about the working people whose lives they control. Her new book is called The Moral Underground: How Ordinary Americans Subvert an Unfair Economy.

11/09/09 – Kicking Us While We’re Down: News & Views on Grocery Worker and Philly Transit Worker Struggles
Tonight’s show is about employers who seize the current economic crisis as an opportunity to pit working people against each other and undermine longstanding union rights. First, we speak with Karyl Feliciano, a Fred Meyer employee, and Jenny Reed, United Food and Commercial Worker (UFCW) union business representative, on large-scale contract negotiations with multiple employers, including Safeway, Albertsons, and Fred Meyer. The Hillsboro Fred Meyer recently called the cops on Jenny Reed and two other union representatives just for talking to union members at the grocery store. Then, we speak with Bryan Mercer and Sean Jin of the Media Mobilizing Project to take a look at the severe anti-union spin of news coverage of the transit strike in Philadelphia that ended today. We close with a little good news for workers in the airline industry.

10/12/09 – Labor and the Future of Journalism
As layoffs and downsizing continue at many newspapers, more people turn to the Internet to get their news. What is the future of the labor movement in the online news industry, where many journalists work from home and have never met their co-workers in person? On August 27th, progressive news source Truthout.org made history as the first online-only news site to form a union. We speak with Maya Schenwar, Executive Director, and Matt Renner, Development Director, about how they won a union at their workplace.

09/14/09 – Class struggle in Portland: City employees battle layoffs, musicians call for a living wage
“How could you cut a Bureau in half?” Maybe you or someone you know works for the City of Portland, or works in an industry like construction that depends on city permitting, or maybe you’re a tenant who’s ever called the city to report housing code violations when your landlord won’t make needed repairs. All those functions are threatened as the City prepares to lay off half the staff of the Bureau of Development Services. Our guest is Carol Justice, longtime City employee and member of AFSCME 189, working together with other unions to fight the cuts. “This is a class war,” she tells KBOO. “This is the middle class fighting to keep just what they have — we’re not even asking for more.” Then, “This is my day job:” Despite the high profile of Portland’s music scene, professional musicians struggle to make ends meet in our town, on fees that often work out to even less than minimum wage. Our guests — musicians Sean Hudson, Graham Smith-White, and Jennifer Woodall, and publicist Matt Kalinowski — are among those banding together with AFM 99 to ask venues and fans to support what they’re calling fair trade music.

08/10/09 – What’s Wrong With the Recovery? …and… Car Wash Workers Organize
First up: Why isn’t the stimulus solving the economic crisis for working families? Why is Wall Street so anxious to reassure us that things are looking up again? Should working people be worried about deficit spending? And what simple policy change could eliminate Social Security’s funding problem? Marty Hart-Landsberg, Professor of Economics at Lewis and Clark College and author of the blog Reports from the Economic Front, explains it all for you in the first half of tonight’s show. Then in the second half of the show, we hear about ten thousand workers in Los Angeles who are organizing to join the United Steelworkers. They are subject to massive health and safety violations in the workplace. Many are not even paid minimum wage. Who are they? Car washers. We’re joined by by Henry Huerta, Campaign Director of the CLEAN Car Wash Campaign.

07/13/09 – Los Angeles teachers’ hunger strike against layoffs; Mining communities in Colombia and Kentucky
Sean Leys, Los Angeles public school teacher and AFT member, found the support of his dry cleaner and even the rival school’s debate team when he participated in a 24-day hunger strike against 6,000 teacher layoffs he said would violate students’ civil rights. Now he and fellow teachers are organizing a radical volunteer summer school. Aviva Chomsky traveled with other activists from Massachusetts to Colombia to meet with the coal miners who supply their local power plant. The delegation also visited with mining communities in Kentucky. Chomsky is a professor of History and Latin American Studies at Salem State College in Massachusetts, author of Linked Labor Histories: New England, Columbia, and the Making of a Global Working Class, and a founder of North Shore Colombia Solidarity Committee.

07/06/09 – Knights of the road: lost history of the tramp printers and their union (Special short piece!)
You’ve heard of the cowboy poets and the lumberjacks, but why has history almost hushed up the tale of the tramp printers, who hopped trains and drank and set type and ran presses, and who by the mid-1800s had built a militant union with equal pay for women and a worker-run hiring system? Labor Radio spoke with Charles Overbeck, co-founder of Portland’s Eberhardt Press, and author of a new essay on the history of tramp printers.

06/08/09 – Are banks the new bosses? Hartmarx and Quad City struggles in Illinois
Last December, working people around the world celebrated the victory of the Republic Window and Door Factory workers, members of United Electrical workers, who occupied their factory for six days and won their struggle to hold Bank of America accountable to pay them the money they were owed at the closing of their factory. Today on Labor Radio we hear about two more factory worker struggles out of Illinois, the Hartmarx suit factory workers in Chicago, members of Workers United, and the Quad City Die Casting factory workers, members of United Electrical Workers. In both of the struggles this spring, the opponent is not Bank of America but its class comrade Wells Fargo. Are banks the new bosses? And why all this militancy out of Illinois? We talk with activists from both struggles: Robert Ginsburg, founder of the Center on Work and Community Development, who does strategic research for the Hartmarx workers, and Ed Pelegrin, a nine-year employee of Quad City Die Casting and a member of UE Local 1174.

05/11/09 – Banking on Justice: Laboring in the Financial Sector
Banks get bailed out and workers get left out! As our economy spiraled out of control, the eight Big Banks received a total of $125 Billion in taxpayer funds. Bank CEOs got bonuses even as many banks amped up lobbying against the Employee Free Choice Act. But in our discussion of the financial crisis, front-line bank workers are often left out of the conversation. We speak with Rebecca Nay, a former bank employee (and our usual program engineer!), about her experience in the banking industry and gender identity discrimination in the workplace. We are also joined by Peter Cervantes-Gauschi, co-founder of Enlace, to discuss the “Tax the TARP Subsidy” campaign. Seven financial holding companies have subsidiaries incorporated in Oregon that received a total of over $105 billion from TARP. What would a TARP Subsidy tax look like in Oregon? How do we demand justice from banks?

04/13/09 – Long Difficult Struggles & Hope–El Salvador & Oak Harbor
Tonight’s show is about long, hard struggles. In the first half, David Ayala joins us to trace the decades of brave organizing by working people in El Salvador to achieve this year’s FMLN’s presidential victory. And in the second half, Jeff Tyrrell returns with the latest on the workers at Oak Harbor Freight Lines, now engaged in their own long, difficult struggle for a fair contract. For more information on the Teamsters’ Oak Harbor struggle visit ww.oakharborteamsters.com.

03/12/09 – Flight attendants organize at the world’s new largest airline; immigrants organize for dignity and respect in Columbia County
What kind of election counts every non-vote as a “No” vote? A union election for airline or railroad workers under the Railway Labor Act. As Delta and Northwest merge to form the world’s largest airline, a combined unit of twenty-one thousand flight attendants find their chance at union representation hangs upon a wildly skewed process overseen by a little-known board. Simone Cerasa, the New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut State Chair of the Delta Association of Flight Attendants, CWA, joined us to lay out some key issues and challenges of organizing under the RLA, and how a new appointment by President Obama to the National Mediation Board could make all the difference. Also in this show, Yesenia Sanchez, President of the new organization Latinos Unidos por un Futuro Mejor, joined us to talk about Columbia County community members rising up to build a network of dignity and respect in the wake of an anti-worker, anti-immigrant ballot measure passed in November.

02/11/09 – Economic Crisis as a Response to Class Struggle
Radical scholars of political economy George Caffentzis & Silvia Federici of the Midnight Notes Collective join us live in-studio. How are the economic crisis and bailouts a response to class struggle? What does capital hope to achieve with this crisis? How does the crisis hit people doing care work? What kinds of resistance will be most effective now?

01/12/09 – Education workers – PSU profs face their toughest bargaining ever, and tenement museum guides organize a union
Gary Brodowicz, Past President, and Michele Gamburd, Vice President for Collective Bargaining, Portland State University Chapter, American Association of University Professors
Hildegard Hoeller, part-time guide, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, organizing with UAW 2110

12/08/08 – Oak Harbor Freight Lines strike, and Nelson Lichtenstein on bank bailouts and UE sit-in
Jeff Tyrrel, member of Teamsters Local 81 and striking dockworker of Oak Harbor Freight Lines
Nelson Lichtenstein, Professor of History, University of California, Santa Barbara (excerpt from Jenka Soderberg’s interview)
And songs from the Seattle Labor Chorus’s new CD, Ring It In! Songs of Peace and Justice for the Holiday Season

11/10/08 – Workers’ resistance to occupation and empire
Jana K. Lipman, Author, Guantánamo: A Working-Class History between Empire and Revolution
Michael Eisenscher, National Coordinator, U.S. Labor Against the War

10/13/08 – Economic policy and working people: Financial crisis and free trade agreements
Arthur Stamoulis, Director, Oregon Fair Trade Campaign
Barbara Dudley, Professor of Political Science, Portland State University

9/8/08 – Street Roots vendors in the labor movement
David, Tony Hulk, & Roger Moore, Street Roots vendors
Israel Bayer, Director, Street Roots

9/1/08 – Labor Day Special: Portland Restaurant Workers’ Association
Misty Cumbie, Portland Restaurant Workers’ Association

8/11/08 – Layoffs of California public employees, Oregon anti-worker ballot measures, and labor’s stake in global warming
Adrienne Suffin, SEIU Local 1000
Scott Moore, Defend Oregon
Barbara Byrd, Secretary-Treasurer, Oregon AFL-CIO

7/14/08 – Portland day labor center and WPA labor theater
Romeo Sosa, Executive Director, VOZ Workers’ Rights Education Project
Susan Quinn, Author of Furious Improvisation: How the WPA and a cast of thousands made high art out of desperate times

6/9/08 – LGBTQ pride at work, bicycling for worker justice, and immigrant guest workers on hunger strike
LC Hansen, President, National Association of Letter Carriers, Branch 82
Jeremy Bishop, Executive Director, Pride At Work
Sabrina Gogol, bicyclist, activist, radical, and AFSCME member
Stephen Boykewich, Media Director, New Orleans Workers’ Center for Racial Justice

5/12/08 – Freightliner Five, student sit-ins against sweatshops, and day labor worker centers
Franklin Torrence, Allen Bradley, Glenna Swinford, & Robert Whiteside, Bargaining Committee members, UAW Local 3520 (“the Freightliner Five”)
Salma Mirza, University of North Carolina, and Prairie Wolfe, University of Montana, student activists
Nik Theodore, Director of the Center for Urban Economic Development, University of Illinois

4/14/08 – Debt crisis, Oaxacan popular movement, and Colombia Free Trade Agreement
Jim Lardner, Co-author, Up to Our Eyeballs: How Shady Lenders and Failed Economic Policies Are Drowning Americans in Debt
Jill Friedberg, Filmmaker, Un Poquito de Tanta Verdad (A Little Bit of So Much Truth)
Arthur Stamoulis, Director, Oregon Fair Trade Campaign

3/10/08 – U.S.-China worker solidarity and Portland State University faculty labor struggles
Professor Kent Wong, Director, UCLA Center for Labor Research and Education
Professors Gary Brodowicz and Julia Getchell, PSU AAUP
Professor Brooke Jacobson, PSUFA, AFT

2/11/08 – Beef Northwest, cross-trade solidarity, and international solidarity with workers in Latin America and China
Steve Witte, United Farm Workers
Michael B., Carpenters 24/7, and Hilary, IBEW Local 48, Cross-Trade Solidarity
Sean Benjamin, freelance journalist, UNITE HERE Local 2

1/21/08 – MLK Day: Sisters of the Road’s Civic Action Group and North Carolina sanitation worker at the U.S. Social Forum
Patrick Nolen and Julio Vasquez, Sisters of the Road Civic Action Group
North Carolina sanitation worker, U.S. Social Forum

12/10/07 – International Human Rights Day: Labor rights as human rights
Carol Pier, Human Rights Watch senior labor rights and trade researcher
Gay Seidman, University of Wisconsin Professor of Sociology
Julia Perkins, Coalition of Immokalee Workers
Elana Guiney, Political Coordinator, Oregon AFL-CIO

11/19/07 – New York Taxi Workers’ Alliance and Portland Public Schools workers’ contract struggle
Bhairavi Desai, New York Taxi Workers’ Alliance
Kevin Pest, Portland Public Schools Custodian, SEIU Local 503