Cornell's Crackdown on Palestine Solidarity Protests Could Force Grad Student-Worker to Leave US (w/ Jawuanna McAllister & Jenna Marvin)
Release Date: 10/03/2024
Trump escalates the war on federal unions
Working People
Last week, President Trump escalated his administration's war on the federal workforce and workers’ rights when he signed an executive order to end collective bargaining with federal labor unions across the government. The National Treasury Employees Union, which represents 150,000 government employees, has sued the Trump administration over the executive order.In response to these intensifying assaults on federal workers, agencies, and critical programs like Social Security, unions, social justice and community organizations, veterans groups, and people of conscience will be participating...
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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
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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...
info_outlineThe student encampment movement last school year turned institutions of higher education into flashpoints of struggle over Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, US support for it, and the right to speak out against it. This year, college and university campuses have become laboratories of repression where different administrative efforts to silence Palestine solidarity and antiwar demonstrators are being deployed. And that is playing out right now at Cornell University.
As Aaron Fernando writes at The Nation, “Cornell University, in Ithaca, New York, has taken disciplinary action against an international student that will likely force him to leave the country, and could have a chilling effect on other international students participating in political protests.
Momodou Taal is a PhD candidate in Africana studies and a graduate student worker, attending Cornell under the F-1 visa program. In the last academic year, Taal joined student-led actions demanding that Cornell divest from industries complicit in Israel’s attacks on civilians in Gaza.”
The Cornell grad worker union, Cornell Graduate Students United-UE, released a statement condemning the university’s disciplinary actions against Taal, and is demanding the administration bargain with the union “over the effects of the discipline administered to Taal.” “CGSU-UE condemns Taal’s suspension, which represents a disturbing pattern of discriminatory discipline against marginalized graduate workers. The union is still fighting for just cause protections in discipline and discharge, due process for academic evaluations, strong academic freedom, and nondiscrimination protections inclusive of political affiliation and action, religious practice, and caste.” In this urgent episode, Max speaks about Cornell’s actions against Taal with two members of the CGSU-UE bargaining committee: Jenna Marvin, a third-year PhD student in the History of Art & Visual Studies at Cornell; and Jawuanna McAllister, a sixth-year PhD candidate in Molecular Biology and Genetics at Cornell.
Additional links/info below…
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Petition: “UE Local 300 Member Facing Firing and Deportation for Exercising Free Speech”
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Call for other grad unions to sign “Solidarity Statement of Support for Momodou Taal”
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Aaron Fernando, The Nation, “A Cornell graduate student faces deportation after a pro-Palestine action”
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Miles Klee, Rolling Stone, “Cornell grad student who attended pro-Palestine protest could be forced to leave U.S.”
Permanent links below…
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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…
Jules Taylor, “Working People” Theme Song
Studio Production: Max Alvarez
Post-Production: Jules Taylor