"Rather than viewing strikes as a last-resort bargaining tactic, the labor movement must embrace them as engines of political transformation."Erik Baker, an American historian, associate editor at The Drift, and a former UAW staff organizer, joins Laborwave to discuss his article for Jewish Currents, Revaluing the Strike. You can read the full arti…

Eric Dirnbach joins the show to discuss premajority unionism, where you don't need to wait around to act like a union but can be a union from the start! We also talk about strikes, dues checkoff, fighting corporate giants like Starbucks and Amazon, and more. Check out the article written by Eric Dirnbach and Colette Perold on premajority unionism a…

Back from hiatus with a no holds barred takedown of every popular argument for reviving the power of organizing labor! Marianne Garneau, editor in chief of Organizing Work, joins the discussion to breakdown the debates on organizing the unorganized, the rank and file strategy, and forming new types of contemporary unions.Check out my new article in…

Matthew Dimick, Professor of Law at the University of Buffalo, joins the show to respond to recent debate over the Wagner Act. Dimick makes clear that rather than trying to posit the Act was a gift to labor that the labor movement should be cautious whenever the state seeks to substitute its powers for unions own self-activity. Our discussion touch…

Toni Gilpin joins the show to discuss her book, The Long Deep Grudge, which chronicles the epic battles of the Farm Equipment Workers Union (FE) against corporate giant International Harvester.From the book description, "International Harvester – and the McCormick family that largely controlled it – garnered a reputation for bare-knuckled union-bus…

Second episode in our discussion of the life and thought of William Z. Foster. On this go around Lucas Carpenter and Tim Shields join the show to do a deep dive over Foster's proposed methods for effective labor organizing. In particular we examine his pamphlets Organizing Methods in the Steel Industry and Strike Strategy. We also discuss the techn…

Nick Driedger joins the show to discuss the legacy and ideas of William Z. Foster, former president the Communist Party USA and trade unionist involved in the early IWW and AFL. We adopt a critical lens discuss Foster's concepts of a "militant minority" and "boring from within" as a strategy for pulling conservative unions to the left. Driedger als…

Graham Kovich joins the show to discuss varying media and communications strategies for increasing union power. Graham is running for the role of Communications Officer for the IWW and explains his viewpoints on the need for internally focused communications that are member-driven, and how and when it's most effective to utilize external communicat…

Daisy Pitkin joins the show to discuss her book about labor organizing and solidarity, On The Line.Daisy Pitkin has spent more than twenty years as a community and union organizer, working first in support of garment workers around the world, and then for U.S. labor unions organizing industrial laundry workers. Her essays have been awarded the Mont…

Joe Burns discusses class struggle unionism on this joint episode between Laborwave Radio and Wobcast of Organizing Work. Marianne Garneau collaborates on this interview with Joe Burns about his forthcoming book from Haymarket, Class Struggle Unionism.The current labor movement is dominated, and negatively influenced, by what Burns describes as "la…

Michael Beyea Reagan discusses the characteristics of intersectional class struggle and shares insights around movement-building geared toward the task of fighting all forms of oppression.Get a copy of the book that informs this conversation at https://www.akpress.org/intersectional-class-struggle.html Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Ne…

Liz, host of Rebel Steps podcast, joins the show to discuss a fictional workplace campaign to unionize the hotel workers at the illustrious White Lotus!Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the network's co-conspirators at channelzeronetwork.com Sen…

Andrea Haverkamp, a labor organizer based in Seattle, joins the show to talk shop about organic leaders, private vs public sector organizing approaches, one-on-one conversations, internal democracy, and more!Laborwave Radio has joined the Channel Zero Network, an english-based anarchist radio/podcast network run by radical media makers. Explore the…

Bill Fletcher Jr joins the show and discusses the need for "social justice unionism" in a post-Janus United States. Workers are increasingly atomized in the US, and the state continues to rollback any investments into the reproductive labor that stitches society together. The moment, as Fletcher Jr states, that organized labor can seize for victory…

Joe Burns, a veteran union negotiator and labor lawyer and the author of Strike Back and Reviving the Strike, joins the show to discuss the role militant traditional labor strikes have in revitalizing the labor movement. His forthcoming book is Class Struggle Unionism, from Haymarket Books.Burns highlights the limitations of labor strategies that p…

Marianne Garneau, publisher of Organizing.Work, joins the show to discuss her article Workplace Struggles Are Political.Garneau's provides a necessary corrective over common views amongst "socialists" that work and politics are two separate spheres in which struggle takes place. Following the wrongheaded opinion of Lenin, who assessed workers as on…

Graham Kovich joins the show to plan an organizing campaign for the servants in Beauty & the Beast!Graham and I imagine ourselves as two salt shakers, transformed into our alienated selves along with our fellow servants, under the repressive thumb of the "Beast" in a far-away castle in a long ago time. What pressure do we as servants have to change…

Eric Laursen, author of The Operating System: An Anarchist Theory of the Modern State, joins the show to provide a concrete analysis of the State as opposed to states and compares the modern state to an operating system. As he explains, the State seeks to be everything. The State absorbs dissent and incorporates it into building a more expansive St…

Eric Dirnbach joins the show to discuss his experience as an advanced organizer with EWOC, the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee, a joint partnership of the DSA and UE. Dirnbach challenges organized labor to train one million workers for unionizing the masses, and we discuss whether popular education models such as EWOC are suited for the ta…

Gabriel Winant, historian and author of The Next Shift, joins the show to discuss the decline of union power in the face of speed-ups and an expanding framework of labor relations. Our conversation focuses on worker rebellion, the political failure alongside economic gains for organized labor in the postwar era, and the lessons we can learn from th…

Comrades Luke and Tim join the show to discuss the rank and file critique of business unionism put forward by Stan Weir.Throughout his writings and his life Stan Weir operated by the creed that one should not "let people feel that their job is to sit back and admire somebody else." Our conversation focuses on Stan Weir's critique of "business union…

Re-issue of our conversation with Marianne Garneau discussing her article in Organizing.Work, "You Say You Want a General Strike?"Garneau takes a critical look at general strikes conducted in Europe and argues they have not had the powerful impacts popularly imagined by US audiences. She then discusses the possibilities of importing the tactic to t…

Hamilton Nolan joins the show to elaborate on his article "Get Rid of No Strike Clauses and Stop Begging" written for In These Times.Nolan argues that the right to strike is the only thing that gives working people power. He identifies the weaknesses of organized labor within a paradigm of collective bargaining where surrendering the right to strik…

Veteran labor organizer, Elizabeth Laycak, joins the show to discuss how two new workers employed by Dunder Mifflin Paper Co. in Scranton, PA would initiate a unionization campaign with a strategy to win. We cover mapping and charting, assessments, identifying leaders (and isolating anti-union workers), along with the importance of secrecy and inoc…

Ruby and Zama, workers at Amazon and members of Amazonians United, join the show to discuss their methods of shop floor organizing and direct unionism.They share stories of how AU emerged, initially through breaking bread and resocializing the workplace, to their first direct action demanding access to water in the shop. We also discussed the dismi…

Marybeth Seitz-Brown, organizer and former rank-and-file member with the NewsGuild of New York, joins the show to discuss how deep organizing is necessary for building robust union democracy and pushing union members to tackle the biggest issues of the day. Building off her article, "The Left Needs to Engage Members If We Want to Win Big" in The Fo…

Comrades Andrea, Kali, Luke, and Nick join the show to discuss the film Lapsis, from writer/director Noah Hutton. In a parallel present, delivery man Ray Tincelli takes a job in the gig economy. He begins pulling cable to link together the new quantum trading market.We talk about the film's realistic depiction of working in the gig economy and the …

MK Lees, contributor and regular editor of Organizing Work, joins Laborwave Radio to discuss the strategy of "salting" a workplace to boost a union campaign, and the need to refine this practice for optimal impact.Among topics discussed in this episode is a response to the claim that salting is the best strategy for revitalizing a militant labor mo…

Tom Wetzel, author of the forthcoming book Overcoming Capitalism from AK Press, joins Laborwave Radio to discuss a syndicalist critique of Kim Moody's rank and file strategy. Our conversation focuses on arguments made by Wetzel in two pieces for Black Rose Anarchist Federation, The Case for Building New Unions https://blackrosefed.org/the-case-for-…

Comrades Andrea Haverkamp, Nick Fisher, Tim and Joe Clement join Laborwave Radio for another series of Comrades Read!We dig into the "Rank and File Strategy" a popular 30-page pamphlet written by Kim Moody in 2000 for the publication Solidarity.We provide a summary of Moody's argument, that socialists are marginal in labor unions and therefore need…

Peter Cole joins the show to discuss the second edition of his book Ben Fletcher: The Life and Times of a Black Wobbly published by PM Press. The range and scope of this episode expands over the backdrop of early 20th century Philadelphia and recounts the biographical details of Wobbly organizer Ben Fletcher and the tale of IWW Local 8, a powerful …

Laborwave Radio and the One Big Podcast collaborate on this episode discussing the particulars of solidarity unionism in contrast to business unionism. We dig into the various tenets of solidarity unionism; its emphasis on direct action over contracts, focus on the workplace and industry over legal strategies and electoralism, and the prospects for…

Sarah Jaffe, author, labor journalist, and one of the hosts of Belabored Podcast, joins Laborwave Radio to discuss her new book, Work Won't Love You Back published by Bold Type Books.You’re told that if you “do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.” But as Sarah Jaffe shows, “doing what you love” is a recipe for exploitation, creatin…

Support Laborwave Radio at patreon.com/laborwaveAlex Press, labor reporter and staff writer at Jacobin Magazine, joins the show to discuss Joe Biden's union credentials and what organized labor should and shouldn't expect from a Biden administration. As made clear in this interview- not much without a fight. We also dig into the details of the PRO …

Sustain Laborwave Radio by becoming a patron at patreon.com/laborwave Laborwave spoke with workers at No Evil Foods about the company's union busting strategy against a unionization campaign organized by employees. Megan, John, and Max discuss in detail the tactics of No Evil Foods union busting, including a marathon series of captive audience meet…

Support Laborwave Radio at patreon.com/laborwaveJake Alimahomed-Wilson and Ellen Reese are the editors of The Cost of Free Shipping: Amazon in the Global Economy published by Pluto Press. Order a copy at https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745341484/the-cost-of-free-shipping/With cutting-edge analysis, this book looks at the many facets of the corporati…

The IWW is 115 years old! In celebration we invited Marianne Garneau & Nick Driedger from Organizing Work to discuss the nuts and bolts of organizing within the IWW and our future as a union.What accounts for the recent upsurge in IWW organizing campaigns? How do we make more universal for all Wobblies our educational documents and training program…

Laborwave Radio presents a podcast mini-series, After The Revolution. ​After the Revolution is inspired by the desire to offer more than a diagnosis of what is wrong with today by focusing on what we might be able to bring about instead. Each episode within this series will begin by highlighting the importance of one particular feature of society, …

Crossposting an interview Laborwave Radio host, Alex Riccio, had with Joseph Orosco of the Anarres Project for Alternative Futures about the #ScholarStrike. The recent online #ScholarStrike claimed to be a way for higher ed faculty to engage in radical action in support of racial justice and against police violence in the US. In the conversation I …

Join in on the fun Discord conversations by becoming a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwave We're reading books, sharing articles, and watching movies via discord with our patreon subscribers.We've finished No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power by Jane McAlevey! Each chapter has been discussed at length in our series Comrades Read Together, and t…

We spoke with members of the Angry Workers, a political collective, about the insights from their recent PM Press title, "Class Power on Zero Hours." The Angry Workers spent the last six years working in a London backyard mostly among food and manufacturing workers, and they've chronicled their experiences as well as their efforts to organize along…

On Election Night comrades of the show got together to play games, talk politics, and ease election anxiety (as much as that was possible). Here's a short clip of our four-hour hangout where we discussed Emma Goldman's position on women's suffrage and state politics, the Black Rose Anarchist Federation article on Voting or Abstention, and a recent …

David Graeber was an anthropologist, proponent of anarchism, and participant in many movement struggles of the past two decades including the Alter-Globalization movement and Occupy Wall Street. Among his popular authored books includes Debt: The First 5,000 Years, The Utopia of Rules, Bullshit Jobs, and Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology. He p…

We discussed the legacy and experiences of Occupy Wall Street with two movement participants Marina Sitrin and Vanessa Zettlers, contributors to the recent title Pandemic Solidarity: Mutual Aid during the Covid-19 Crisis published by Pluto Press.Our conversation touched on the ways to recover the real history of OWS and overcome "historical forgett…

We spoke with Amir Fleischmann of the Graduate Employee Organization, a union at the University of Michigan, about their latest strike leveraged to fight the university's reckless reopening plans amid a pandemic. Amir provides a play-by-play of the strike, the events leading up to it and the larger context in which it occurred, and how their union …

Join in on the fun Discord conversations by becoming a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwaveAndrea Haverkamp, president of CGE 6069, joins Laborwave to discuss chapters 5 & 6 of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey; "If We Can Change the White House, We Can Change the Hog House!"Our conversation highlights t…

Joining Laborwave is Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University, to discuss his piece on Identity Politics and Elite Capture published by the Boston Review. "If elite capture boils down to the way power and resources tend to be distributed within groups, and not simply across groups, then it is a fully general proble…

Join in on the fun conversations by becoming a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwaveEllen Kress, former president of GTFF 3544 and current AFT-Oregon officer, and Andrea Haverkamp, president of CGE 6069, join Laborwave for a comradely discussion on chapters 3 & 4 of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey.These…

Join the conversations around this book in our Laborwave Discord by becoming any type of patron of the show at patreon.com/laborwave !!!This is our second episode of Comrades Read Together where we're discussing, chapter by chapter, the book No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age. We follow up our conversation tackling the introdu…

Become a Laborwave Patron at patreon.com/laborwaveAndrea Haverkamp, President of CGE 6069; Sarah Pishioneri, labor organizer based in Oregon; and Alex Riccio, labor organizer based in Philadelphia; have a comradely discussion about the first two chapters of No Shortcuts: Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age by Jane McAlevey.Join us in discuss…