The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire and the Uprising of the 20,000
Working People
As we’ve mentioned many times before on the show, movements today are a part of a legacy of extraordinary actions taken by ordinary people. Tapping into our own labor history provides us with a blueprint for action in today’s turbulent world. On March 25th, 1911, a fire began in the scrap bins under a cutter’s table on the 8th floor of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory in New York City. Within minutes, the entire floor was engulfed in flames, spreading to the ninth floor and 10th floors–where 200+ workers were just finishing up to go home for the night. By the time workers were...
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Privatize USPS? Mail carriers are fighting for a better idea
Working People
This week, we’re taking a more national focus, and checking in with the National Association of Letter Carriers, who have been embroiled in a years-long contract negotiation with the US Postal Service. In our episode today, I’m sitting down with Melissa Rakestraw, member of the National Association of Letter Carriers, Branch 825 in Chicago, IL, to discuss the state of negotiations with our nation’s letter carriers, the unprecedented rejection of the recent Tentative Agreement and what happens next, and what would happen if the US Postal Service was privatized. As a short...
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Show us the ropes: How Touchstone Climbing Gym workers unionized five locations
Working People
This week, we’re staying in Southern California, where the workers of Touchstone Climbing Gym in Los Angeles have been negotiating their first contract with their employer. Touchstone Climbing, a regional climbing gym with over a dozen locations in California, experienced a wave of unionization in its Los Angeles locations early last year. The successful campaign with Workers United created a wall-to-wall union at each of the company’s five locations in the Los Angeles area. Members of the LA-based gym are often themselves union members, and the response from the climbing community has...
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‘It’s Elon versus everyone’: A dire warning from fired federal workers (w/ Cat Farman, Jasmine McAllister, & Will Munger)
Working People
In this urgent episode of Working People, we focus on the Trump-Musk administration’s all-out assault on federal workers and its takeover and reordering of our entire system of government. “At least 20,000 federal workers have so far been fired by the Trump administration,” Ed Pilkington and Chris Stein report in The Guardian, “most of them recent hires on probationary periods who lack employment protections. In addition, the White House claims that more than 75,000 employees have accepted its offer of deferred resignations. The purge has prompted speculation that Trump is...
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Chemically exposed residents of East Palestine, OH, and Conyers, GA, have been left behind (w/ Ashley McCollom, Hannah Loyd, & Kristina Baehr)
Working People
We kick off the new season of Working People with another crucial installment of our ongoing series where we speak with the people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s “sacrifice zones.” In this episode, cohost Maximillian Alvarez speaks with a panel of guests about the ongoing public health crises in East Palestine, OH, where a Norfolk Southern train derailment in Feb. 2023 changed residents’ lives forever, and in Conyers, GA, where residents continue to deal with the toxic fallout of a chemical fire that broke out in Sept. 2024 at a facility owned by pool...
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Democracy dies, first, in the workplace (w/ Hamilton Nolan & Sara Nelson)
Working People
“I did not start out as a writer interested in organized labor,” Hamilton Nolan writes in The Hammer: Power, Inequality, and the Struggle for the Soul of Labor; “I started out as a writer interested in why America was so fucked up. Why did we have such gargantuan levels of inequality? Why were thousands of homeless people living in the streets of cities where billionaires frolicked in penthouses? Why was it that certain classes of people worked hard their entire lives and stayed poor, just as their parents had been, and just as their children seemed doomed to be? Even while labor...
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Sick Georgia residents have been abandoned after toxic BioLab fire (w/ Hannah Loyd, Christina O'Connor, & Jeramie Julian)
Working People
“In late September,” Timothy Pratt writes in Capital & Main, “a massive billow of smoke from a chemical fire spread over metro Atlanta, lingering for weeks and prompting national news coverage. The smoke has cleared, but the anger has not dissipated in Conyers, the city of 20,000 where the fire occurred, and in surrounding areas... Smoke from the blaze left some residents with breathing difficulties, headaches, dizziness and skin rashes in the days that followed, along with a deepening worry about their community’s safety... The fire was pool-chemical company BioLab’s fourth...
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What working people's struggles to survive the Great Depression can teach us today (w/ Dana Frank)
Working People
“During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the US economy almost completely collapsed,” historian Dana Frank writes in her new book, “By 1933 a third of all those who’d had jobs were unemployed; another third were scraping by with lesser work. Racism, far from collapsing, festered and metastasized as insecurity rippled through the country, pushing people of color even further downward... As we face our own crises today—a precarious economy, outrageous inequality and poverty, growing racism, climate change—and lie awake at night, facing our own fears, these stories from...
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Judy Gearhart and the Labor Link Podcast - What can a can of tuna teach us about International Worker Solidarity
Working People
Longtime Working People listeners will be familiar with Max and Mel’s extended work discussing the supply chain, the workers who keep that system running day in and day out, and the dangerous and exploitative working conditions that many workers labor under. Our global economy relies on these workers to stay running–and bosses around the world use this pressure as a cudgel against the workers. For today’s episode of Working People, we’re zooming out and taking a look at the global supply chain with Judy Gearhart, research professor with the Accountability Research Center at...
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Catholic nurses at Ascension call on Bishops to help with contract fight (w/ Gideon Eziama & Lisa Watson)
Working People
On November 12, unionized nurses at Ascension St. Agnes Hospital in Baltimore held a rally in front of the Marriott Hotel downtown, where the US Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) was holding a meeting. St. Agnes nurses rallied with supporters from around the city, and they were even joined by fellow Ascension nurses who traveled from Wichita, Kansas, and Austin, Texas. According to a press release from National Nurses Organizing Committee / National Nurses United (NNOC-NNU), the purpose of the rally was to “highlight how Ascension has failed to follow to both serve and...
info_outline"Vina Colley was Erin Brockovich before Erin Brockovich," Kevin Williams wrote in a 2020 Belt Magazine article titled, "The Poisonous Legacy of Portsmouth’s Gaseous Diffusion Plant." Williams continues, "Colley has become an unlikely citizen-scientist, spending a lifetime researching and documenting PORTS and its sins... Colley was hired as an electrician at the facility in 1980 and worked there for three years. 'I was exposed to everything. We were cleaning off radioactive equipment that we did not know was radioactive. They never told us,' Colley told me. Then, she said, her hair started falling out, she developed rashes, and 'I got really sick and went to the hospital, not knowing that it was my job causing me all these problems. I had big tumors.' In the four decades since, she’s faced a range of health problems, including chronic bronchitis, tumors, and pulmonary edema." In this episode, we sit down with Colley herself to talk about growing up in Ohio during America's Cold War atomic age, her experience working as an electrician at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, and her decades-long fight to hold the plant and the government accountable for what they've done to her, her coworkers, and her community, and to get them the compensation they deserve.
Additional links/info below…
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Vina's Facebook page
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DOL Energy Advisory Board Information: Comments for the Record, "My name is Vina Colley and I am a sick worker from the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion plant in Piketon, Ohio..."
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Kevin Williams, Belt Magazine, "The Poisonous Legacy of Portsmouth’s Gaseous Diffusion Plant"
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Erin Gottsacker, The Ohio Newsroom, "Piketon stopped enriching uranium twenty years ago. Now the nuclear industry is coming back"
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Scioto Valley Guardian, "Residents in Pike County closer to justice and compensation for radioactive contaminants"
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Sen. Sherrod Brown, Press Release: "Brown secures commitment to work to add Pike, Scioto county residents to radiation exposure compensation program"
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Maximillian Alvarez, The Real News Network, "East Palestine residents demand fully-funded healthcare"
Permanent links below...
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Working People Patreon page
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Leave us a voicemail and we might play it on the show!
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Labor Radio / Podcast Network website, Facebook page, and Twitter page
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The Real News Network website, YouTube channel, podcast feeds, Facebook page, and Twitter page
Featured Music...
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Jules Taylor, "Working People" Theme Song