Labor Movement
09 Sep 2023
Featuring Alex Press and Eric Blanc on surging labor militancy and why US unions must seize this historic moment.
24 Aug 2023
Featuring Amna Akbar, Gabriel Winant, and Thea Riofrancos on the emerging terrain of struggle. Is American liberalism exhausted or revitalized? What are the successes and limits of the new US left electoral strategy? Is there...
13 Aug 2023
Featuring Amna Akbar, Gabriel Winant, and Thea Riofrancos on the American conjuncture. Did an era that began with Occupy and Ferguson—marked by teachers strikes, two Bernie campaigns, the explosive growth of DSA, Standing Rock, and...
08 May 2023
Featuring Stacy Davis Gates, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, and Alex Han on how Chicago’s labor left took over City Hall. Brandon Johnson’s mayoral victory, the product of a decade-plus of social movement union struggle, is a model...
23 Apr 2023
Featuring Jennifer Berkshire and Jack Schneider on the politics of public education. The authors of A Wolf at the Schoolhouse Door: The Dismantling of Education and the Future of School and co-hosts of the education...
19 Apr 2023
Read the transcript here: https://jacobin.com/2023/01/rust-belt-steelworkers-deindustrialization-health-industry-care-work
15 Apr 2023
Featuring Jane McAlevey on how to organize mass numbers of new workers into unions that wage mass strikes to fight employers and revive the labor movement.
13 Mar 2023
Featuring Nelson Lichtenstein on his life and scholarship, from membership in the International Socialists and studies of the early United Auto Workers and CIO to his later turn to studying Walmart and international supply chains....
17 Feb 2023
Featuring Donna Murch and Todd Wolfson on Rutgers University workers’ industrial unionism strategy. The second in a two-part series on the crisis in American higher education.
10 Feb 2023
Featuring Dennis Hogan on the crisis in higher education. The first in a two-part series. Next up: Donna Murch and Todd Wolfson on how university workers can fight back through industrial unionism.
22 Dec 2022
Featuring historian Tim Barker on the state of monetary politics amid the current fight over inflation.
07 Nov 2022
Read the transcript here.
02 Oct 2022
Featuring Daisy Pitkin on her book On the Line: A Story of Class, Solidarity, and Two Women’s Epic Fight to Build a Union, a memoir that powerfully captures the drama of an organizing drive—and so...
25 Sep 2022
Featuring Laura Weinrib on The Taming of Free Speech: America’s Civil Liberties Compromise. Did you know that the ACLU was founded as a radical labor organization allied with the IWW? Weinrib traces the rise of...
13 May 2022
Live from New York: Dan interviews Amazon Labor Union president Chris Smalls, Jaz Brisack of Starbucks Workers United, SEIU Local 1199NE president Rob Baril, Jacobin writer Alex Press, and Labor Notes writer Luis Feliz Leon...
14 Jan 2022
Historian Gabriel Winant discusses The Next Shift: The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America. It’s a fascinating study of the emergence of the service sector and a new...
04 Nov 2021
Guest host Gabriel Winant interviews labor journalists Alex Press and Jonah Furman, as well as IATSE member Victor P. Bouzi.
31 May 2021
How ecosocialists formed a powerful coalition with unions to fight for labor law reform and why we need a powerful labor movement to win a Green New Deal. An interview with four members of DSA’s...
24 Apr 2021
US empire in the Philippines, Filipino migration, labor organizing in the fields, and the nativist campaign for Asian exclusion. Dan interviews Rick Baldoz on his remarkable book The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in...
13 Mar 2021
Why we need the PRO Act with Jimmy Williams, General Vice President of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades.
Sign up to join DSA’s PRO Act phonebank
actionnetwork.org/forms/proactphonebank
13 Mar 2021
Dan interviews
Jacobin’s Alex Press and organizer Jonah Furman on the state of the labor movement.
25 Feb 2021
Dan interviews Sarah Jaffe on her book
Work Won’t Love You Back: How Devotion To Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted and Alone.
03 Jan 2021
Dan interviews historian and essayist Gabriel Winant on the social worlds that make US politics and how that sociality is rooted in the economy, carceral state, social media, religion, and more. Read these n+1essays and...
25 Jun 2020
Mike Davis on his classic book about why the US has long lacked strong socialist and labor politics. One recurrent answer: racism.
11 Oct 2019
Dan interviews Alex Gourevitch about how 19th century US labor radicals remade the idea of freedom into a principle of working-class social transformation.
19 Jul 2019
Dan’s lengthy interview with two brilliant Chilean social movement organizers: Alondra Carrillo and Pablo Abufom. Carrillo organizes in the country’s massive feminist movement. Abufom works in the labor-backed movement for a just pension system.
10 Apr 2019
In the US, China is often viewed at best as a nefarious and enigmatic rival and at worst as a civilizational enemy. But these stories of national rivalry that permeate both major parties and the...
27 Mar 2019
The strike is back, and big time. Teachers in particular have been walking off the job not only to demand higher wages but also to fight for an end to privatization and for a transformation...
06 Mar 2019
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18 Jan 2019
The teacher strike wave continues as more than 30,000 members of United Teachers Los Angeles walk picket lines not only for the higher wages that they deserve but also for the well-funded and great schools...
24 Jul 2018
Janus was an entirely expected and atrocious decision. The conservative business interests that successfully obliterated private sector unions hope it will do the same to their public-sector counterparts. Chris Maisano, a contributing editor at Jacobin,...
09 May 2018
Today’s Dig is a very good and somewhat unusual Dig: Dan’s got two interviews with two different people. First, journalist Eric Blanc on the teacher strike wave that he’s been covering for Jacobin. Then comes...
13 Mar 2018
In West Virginia, a focal point of Trump-era liberal armchair ethnography, teachers have won a historic statewide strike just as the Supreme Court is poised to rule in Janus, a case that will mark the...
20 Feb 2018
Dan talks to Randy Bryce (@IronStache), the Berniecrat ironworker taking on Paul Ryan, about how he plans to knockout the House Speaker, Scott Walker’s decimation of unions and Foxconn’s con against the people of Wisconsin....
24 Jan 2018
Everyone agrees that the 1970s was the beginning of the end of capitalism as we had known it since the New Deal. But historian Lane Windham makes it clear that it wasn’t for a lack...
19 Jan 2018
Student workers at Rutgers University are fighting for 15 dollars an hour. Undergraduate history major and dining-hall worker Danny Taylor of @RutgersUSAS talks about their struggle. Thanks to Verso Books for their support. Check out...
27 Oct 2017
The exposure of Weinstein’s predations has reignited widespread fury over the longstanding problem of sexual harassment and assault—especially in the workplace. Jacobin editor @alexnpress discusses two new pieces she wrote on how dealing with these...
05 Jul 2017
Workers have for years faced a neoliberal onslaught administered by a bipartisan establishment of technocratic elites who have ensured the redistribution of wealth into the hands of the rich. This is an elite that has...