I would like to see Texas become the center of the universe for bitcoin and crypto,” US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said in 2021. In 2024, Republican Governor Greg Abbott said Texas “wears the crown as the bitcoin mining capital of the world.” B
One year ago, Columbia University became ground zero for the student-led Gaza solidarity encampment movement that spread to campuses across the country and around the world. Now, Columbia has become ground zero for the Trump administration’s
International students are being abducted and disappeared by ICE in broad daylight. Life-saving research projects across the academy are being halted or thrown into disarray by seismic cuts to federal grants. Dozens of universities are under fe
On Tuesday, April 8, unions, unionized federal workers, and their supporters around the country mobilized for a national “Kill the Cuts” day of action to protest the Trump administration’s cuts to life-saving research, healthcare, and education
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 Emp
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.
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 w
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 location
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
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 Alv
“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 h
“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 dissi
“During the Great Depression of the 1930s, the US economy almost completely collapsed,” historian Dana Frank writes in her new book, What Can We Learn from the Great Depression? “By 1933 a third of all those who’d had jobs were unemployed; anot
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 worker
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 support
Sacrifice zones are areas where people have been left to live in conditions that threaten life itself, from toxic industrial pollution to the deadly, intensifying effects of man-made climate change. In a more just and less cruel society, the ve
Two years ago, the US was on the cusp of seeing its first national rail strike in decades. Then, President Joe Biden, at the urging of the rail companies, and with the help of both parties in Congress, preemptively blocked railroad workers from
Last year, we summoned all the Alvarez siblings from the ether to record our annual Halloween episode. Sadly, we were not able to record a new Halloween episode in 2024, but to celebrate the holiday and give listeners a break from all the heavy
On Monday, Oct 21, 2400 behavior health workers at Kaiser Permanente’s Southern California locations walked off the job in their ongoing struggle for a fair contract. Over the summer, negotiations between the health system and the bargaining co
We’re coming up on a pretty mind-blowing anniversary in the news labor world–Two years ago, in October 2022, after the newspaper unilaterally cut off insurance benefits to production workers and newsroom workers filed ULPs for bad-faith bargain
Over the past two weeks, people around the country have watched in horror as our neighbors and fellow workers have been battered by the successive disasters of Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton. “After making landfall as a Category 4 hurric
The 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 a
As the climate crisis intensifies, billions of poor and working people around the world are suffering from lack of regular (or any) access to clean water, but the dawn of “AI” is about to make the problem much worse. In their recent report for
Two years ago, workers from several different Trader Joe’s grocery stores joined the wave of unionization efforts spreading across the country. Workers in Hadley, Massachusetts, made history in 2022 by not only becoming the first Trader Joe’s s
While Max was inside the Labor Notes conference this past April, attending panels and sharing space with intelligent, hard working organizers, Mel was wandering the conference grounds outside, meeting folks and talking about the joy of being a